Sharonimo Launch

7th April, 2009 - Posted by Jon -

Our public beta launches tomorrow. We’ve been testing it for the last couple of weeks, and it’s already saved me about $50, so I’m pretty excited about it.

Mark, Aaron and I built the Sharonimo software because we wanted to use it. We wanted sharing to be easier, safer and more fun for us—and we figured other people would want the same. I hope we were right—not because of the time and money we’ve invested (though I think about that, too), but because I want to live in the world we imagined when we first started work on this project: a world in which people maximize their resources, trust and depend on each other more, and lead healthier, happier lives.

It seems to me that sharing—real sharing, involving real costs and benefits—is an essential human activity, and that the desire to share is hard-wired in all of us. If we share less than we might, it’s because our culture, and the complexity of our modern lives, make it more difficult than it should be. We’re trained by our culture (at least in the U.S.) to be independent, skeptical, and protective of what’s ours. We’re not trained to rely on each other, trust each other, or give before we get. Most of us are continually juggling multiple tasks, objectives and responsibilities, so even when we overcome the cultural obstacles to sharing, we’re foiled by practical ones—by the problems of knowing who has what we need, who needs what we have, and where everything is at any given time, among others. These cultural and practical obstacles prevent us from living as well as we might—from knowing our friends as well as we might, from using our money as well as we might—and they aren’t easy to overcome.

At Sharonimo, our mission is to increase global sharing volume by reducing and removing barriers to sharing. Unfortunately, this won’t solve all the world’s problems—but it will make life better for you and your friends, and their friends and their friends, and that’s something.